Cast & Crew

Odu Raja Odu Movie Review

Odu Raja Odu Synopsis: A wife wants her husband to get her a set-top box. The husband goes out to buy it with his drug peddler friend and gets into problems that soon spiral out of control.

Odu Raja Odu Review: By now, black comedies have become a familiar genre in Tamil cinema, with films like Soodhu Kavvum and Moodar Koodam the benchmarks. Odu Raja Odu doesn’t quite match those films, both in terms of writing and filmmaking, but it manages to be frequently amusing.

The plot revolves around Manohar (Guru Somasundaram), who is battling writer’s block. His wife, Meera (Lakshmi Priyaa) wants him to get a set-top box. His friend, Peter (Venkatesh Harinath), a drug peddler, is more of a druggie. Peter’s supplier, Gajapathi (Melvin Rajan), and his boss, Veerabhadran (Deepak), arm-twists Manohar and Peter to do a dealing for them. But everything that can go wrong goes wrong. They lose the gangster’s cash, end up with the ‘dead body’ of his rival, Kalimuthu (Nasser) in their hands, and are forced to keep running. Meanwhile, we have Nakul (Anandsami), who plans to exact revenge by kidnapping Kalimuthu, with his friend Imran (Abhishek) and wife Mary (Ashiqa Salvan)! Then there is Chellamuthu, Kalimuthu’s brother, who plots to kill his own brother. A couple of slum kids, Malar (Baby Harini) and Sathya (Master Rahul), also figure in this mix, leading to confusions and hilarity.

Odu Raja Odu does take quite a bit of time to set up its premise — in fact, almost the entire first half. But then, when there are about 20 principal characters and multiple plotlines, that feels unavoidable. The filmmakers do try to make the characters memorable for us, by providing quirky descriptions — Aruntha Vaalu, Thunai Mappillai, Malgova Manaivi, Ex-Mudichavuki, Aasai Nayagi and so on. There is quirkiness in the scenes and dialogues, too. We have an assassin called Lion (a star cameo), inspired from the bounty hunter in Raising Arizona. We get details about a kiss that dislocated a person’s jaw. One of the gangster’s underlings, we learn, are engineering graduates. Even the set-top box is a commentary on the industry; Meera wants to watch Vishwaroopam (which Kamal Haasan had initially planned to release on DTH on the same day of its theatrical release)!

But the film doesn’t come together as well as it should. For one, it isn’t as funnier as its plot implies. Some of the quirkiness feels forced. The female characters are all portrayed mainly as sex objects. Meera is lusted after by her neighbour. Kalimuthu’s wife, Mythili (Sona Heiden) has sex with Peter. Mary has an affair with Imran, and admits she cannot choose between the two men. The hyper-linked script, by Nishanth Ravindaran, who has also edited the film (in a way that makes scenes bleed into one another), slightly alters the timelines of the plot to make it more interesting. For example, we see a car crash in one scene, which then proceeds further, but then, after a few minutes, we get a scene which shows what resulted in the car crash. The film wants us to do two things simultaneously — replay events that we had seen minutes earlier in our mind even as we watch events that are unfolding on screen. This does pose a problem for a less-alert viewer, who might find it all convoluted — which it is, by design — but if you do pay attention, the film does reward you quite a bit. But is it too much to ask of a casual viewer?

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